AoI-Aware Resource Scheduling for Industrial IoT with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Effective resource scheduling methods in certain scenarios of Industrial Internet of Things are pivotal. In time-sensitive scenarios, Age of Information is a critical indicator for measuring the freshness of data. This paper considers a densely deployed time-sensitive Industrial Internet of Things scenario. The industrial wireless device transmits data packets to the base station with limited channel resources under the constraints of Age of Information. It is assumed that each device has the capacity to store the packets it generates. The device will discard the data to alleviate the data queue backlog when the Age of Information of the data packet exceeds the threshold. We developed a new system utility equation to represent the scheduling problem and the problem is expressed as a trade-off between minimizing the average Age of Information and maximizing network throughput. Inspired by the success of reinforcement learning in decision-processing problems, we attempt to obtain an optimal scheduling strategy via deep reinforcement learning. In addition, a reward function is constructed to enable the agent to achieve improved convergence results. Compared with the baseline, our proposed algorithm can achieve better system utility and lower Age of Information violation rate.